Kannus glanced across the faces of Cal and the others. He lingered on Mizette for a few moments. “Whatever happens, she stays with me,” he said. “The Greyx are to remain off-limits.”
“Of course,” said Vajazzle.
“And you have a ship? You can take them now, before the others awaken?”
“Oh yes. I have one right here,” Vajazzle replied.
On some unseen signal, a patch of air that was easily half the size of Manhattan began to shimmer. A moment later, a vast battle cruiser filled the space that had previously appeared empty.
Very aware of the tip of Kannus’s blade, Cal shifted his eyes left and right to look at his friends. “See?” he said. “Cloaked!”
“Man, that is one big ship,” Mech said.
“It’s the Zertex AX11 war cruiser,” said Loren, a little breathlessly. “It’s the biggest frontline battle ship on the fleet. I’ve read about it… a lot, but I’ve never seen it in real life before. The cloaking thing must be some kind of proto-tech.”
“I like the color,” said Cal, gazing up at the completely black hull. “It’s pretty.”
“You will hand Cal Carver and his associates over to me, and I shall deliver them to Zertex,” Vajazzle said, in the voice of someone who knew exactly how the next few minutes were going to play out. “You may keep your Lifebound, but – if you don’t mind some advice – I’d keep her out of the public eye until you’ve… broken her in a little.”
“But… Graxan,” Kannus said. “What shall I tell them on Greyx Prime?”
“Tell them whatever you like,” said Vajazzle, shrugging beneath her cloak. “Tell them the Earthling did it. Tell them I did it. Tell them he and I were working together, and that Graxan died so that others may live. You’re a bright boy, Kannus. You’ll think of something.”
Behind her, dozens of small, saucer-shaped ships detached themselves from beneath the AX11 and swooped in for a landing approach. Even in the shadows of her hood, Cal could see Vajazzle’s grin of triumph. “He who wields the Bladestaff rules the Greyx,” she said. “So go, Your Majesty. And rule.”
One of the saucer-ships stopped in the air directly above Cal. A beam of crackling purple light engulfed him, making his hair stand on end. From other ships, two more beams of the light locked onto Mech and Loren.
“What the fonk is this?” demanded Mech. He tried to step free of the beam, but a jolt of pain tore through his synapses, forcing him to stand still.
“Don’t worry, Miz, it’s going to be OK,” said Cal, shouting to make himself heard over the high-pitched whine that was suddenly screaming in his ears. “We’ll find you. I’ll find you.”
“No, mongrel,” growled Kannus. “You won’t.”
He lunged, smashing the wooden handle of the Bladestaff across the bridge of Cal’s nose. The last thing Cal heard was a roar from Mizette, then the swirling purple light around him gave way to a deep, suffocating black.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
There was a pressure in Cal’s head. That was the first thing he noticed.
The second thing he noticed was that his hands and feet were tied. He could feel something cold and metallic against his wrists, and a deeply uncomfortable tightness around his ankles.
The third thing he noticed was that he’d possibly wet himself. He shifted his legs a little, rubbing his thighs together.
Correction: he’d definitely wet himself.
The fourth thing he noticed in what was now becoming quite a long list, was that his eyes were closed. Just out of interest, he opened them. What he saw confused him immensely.
He was barely two feet from the ceiling in a small, cell-like room. The bit of the ceiling that was directly above him had been covered in plastic sheeting, although he couldn’t quite figure out how it was attached, or why it wasn’t flopping down.
The room had one door, but it extended downwards from the roof, not upwards from the floor, flying in the face of tradition. A thought nagged at Cal, but it was trapped by the pressure throbbing around inside his skull and couldn’t quite manage to make itself heard.
There was a small black leather bag sitting on a table nearby. The table was upside-down and, like pretty much everything else he’d spotted so far, attached to the ceiling. Despite this, the case didn’t fall off.
Craning his neck, Cal saw that the room was lit by a single dome-shaped light fitting. It was fixed to the center of the floor, which seemed to be quite a long way away.
The nagging thought finally managed to battle its way through. “You’re upside down,” it told him. And it was right, he was.
The door slid open with a sudden clank, making him jump. The rope attaching him to the ceiling – the real ceiling – creaked as he swung slowly back and forth.
“Ah. You are awake.”
“Oh, hey, Vajazzle,” Cal said, making a valiant stab at sounding casual. “Fancy seeing you here. Nice boots. Never noticed them before. Of course, I’ve never been hanging upside-down in front of you, so that might explain it.” He smiled warmly. “So… how have you been?”
A rectangle of the wall directly ahead of him illuminated. A face appeared. To Cal, the man on the screen looked to be the right way up, which meant that the image, like Cal, was upside-down.
“Eugene Adwin!” said President Sinclair. He tapped himself on the forehead. “No, wait, I mean Cal Carver.” He wagged a playfully reproachful finger. “I still can’t believe you had us all fooled, you old shyster! Did I ever tell you the story, Lady Vajazzle? About Mr Carver here and Eugene ‘The Butcher’ Adwin?”
“No, and I have no interest in hearing it,” she said.
“Fair enough,” said Sinclair, with a chuckle. “But if you ever change your mind, you just let me know.”
“Hey, Sinclair,” said Cal, cocking his head just a little. “Is it just me or… have you put on weight?”
A flicker of concern flitted across the president’s face, but then was gone. He laughed and wagged his finger again. “This guy!” he said. “You know, Cal, you have caused me – and this is no exaggeration here – you have caused me no end of trouble.”
Sinclair began listing on his fingers. “You ruined my plan to integrate Zertex more closely with the Symmorium.”
“By ‘integrate’ do you mean when you tried to mind-control them all?” asked Cal, but the president ignored him.
“You made Kornack very unhappy when you didn’t deliver the organism—”
“Splurt,” Cal corrected.
“—and now I’ve got him and half the Remnants giving me so much grief about it, you wouldn’t believe. You killed Legate Jjin, one of my most trusted advisors, and – to my mind, at least - a truly great man. You stole a very expensive ship. Oh… did you get it back, by the way?”
“I did,” said Vajazzle. “It’s aboard.”
“Great! That’s great news!” Sinclair said, giving the assassin a double thumbs-up. “And has he told you where the organism is?”
“Splurt,” Cal said again.
“I haven’t asked,” Vajazzle said. “Would you like me to?”
“Oh my, yes!” laughed Sinclair. “I would like that very much. If we can get it back, it’ll help smooth things over with the Remnants. Feel free to do whatever you need to do to get him to talk. In fact… just warm him up a little in general, will you?”
“That’d be awesome,” said Cal. “It’s kinda chilly in here. I think I can see my breath.” He breathed out a few times, putting more effort into it each time. “No, turns out I can’t. Thought I could. Sorry for wasting everyone’s time.” He frowned, just for a moment. “Anyway, what were we talking about again?”
Sinclair twitched with irritation. “Go ahead. Put on your show of bravery, Cal. Please. It’s admirable, it really is. But just know this,” he said, leaning closer to the camera so the top and bottom of his face were cut off by the screen. “Lady Vajazzle is bringing you to me in order that I may hurt you. I h
ave been hurting people for a very long time, and that’s exactly what I intend to do to you, Cal. Hurt you. For a very long time.”
Cal bit his lip. “Are you going to monologue at me?” he asked, his voice cracking. “Please, no, I beg you, anything but that.”
Sinclair’s smile faltered. He leaned back from the camera and very deliberately ticked the final finger off his hand. “And finally, on a more personal level, I just don’t like you very much.”
“Is it my face?” asked Cal. “It’s my face, isn’t it? Because I get that a lot.”
“Haha, yes,” said Sinclair. “I’m quite sure you do.”
He crossed his hands neatly behind his back and rocked on his heels. “You see, the thing you need to keep in mind, Cal, is that you don’t exist. Out here, I mean. The only records of you are on Earth, and even before I killed everyone – apologies again for that, by the way – no-one ever went there. No-one important, at any rate. You are a ghost. A nobody. A nothing. I can keep you for years, and no-one will even know.”
Cal squirmed uncomfortably, making him pendulum gently back and forth. “OK, Sinclair, listen. I know something, OK?” he said. “I’ve got information you need. I can give you it right now.”
Sinclair smirked. “I don’t care. To be honest, I’d rather Lady Vajazzle got it from you the hard way.”
“No, but trust me, this is important,” Cal insisted. “It’s something you’ll want to know.”
Sinclair sighed impatiently, but his curiosity soon got the better of him. “Well? What is it?”
Cal nodded towards the president’s image on the wall. “You’ve got a stain on the front of your shirt. I think it might be mustard.”
Instinctively, Sinclair glanced down.
“Ha!” said Cal. “Made you look.”
The president’s face darkened, but then he forced a smile and wagged his finger again. “Very good. I’ll see you soon, Cal,” he said. “Very much looking forward to it. For now, though, I shall leave you in Lady Vajazzle’s very capable hands. Please, m’lady… take your time.”
The screen blinked off. Vajazzle approached the table. There was the sound of a zip being undone, as she opened the leather bag.
“Secretly, I think he likes me,” said Cal. He watched as she reached inside the bag and pulled out a slim metal case. It looked like a tin that might be used to hold cigars, but Cal had a sinking feeling that Vajazzle wasn’t about to light up. “What you got there?” he asked.
Vajazzle said nothing. She zipped the bag closed and placed it on the floor, then set the metal case in the spot it had occupied. Unfastening a clasp, she opened the case like a book, unfolding it until it lay flat on the tabletop. As Cal’s head was hanging lower than the table, this made it impossible for him to see what was in the case. On balance, he decided he was grateful for that.
“You know, I feel like we haven’t had a chance to really connect. I feel like I hardly even know you,” said Cal. “The real you, I mean, warts and all! Not that I’m suggesting you have warts – I’m sure you don’t, and if you do, then that’s fine, too. Nothing wrong with a few warts or, you know…” He glanced at the bottom of her robe. “…tentacles, or whatever. What I mean is— Ooh, Christ, that looks sharp.”
Vajazzle had taken a long sliver of metal from the case, and was studying it. Her robotic eye whirred quietly as it focused on the blade’s razor-sharp tip. After a moment’s consideration, she set it down on the tabletop with the faintest of clinks, then turned her attention back to the case.
“What’s it like having two faces?” Cal asked. “Does the other one have, you know, like its own personality or is it just a sort of spare that you use sometimes if you get bored of using your main one? Like a back-up face?”
Cal licked his lips, which were suddenly very dry. “Do you two ever argue? ‘Hey, I want us to go this way!’ ‘No, I want us to go this way!’ That sort of thing?”
Vajazzle held up something that looked not unlike a corkscrew, but one that had been specifically designed for dealing with very stubborn bottles. It had three spiral prongs at the end, which all turned slowly when the assassin squeezed the handle.
“Look, what’s Sinclair paying you? Or is that unprofessional of me to ask?” Cal said, starting to babble now. “Ballpark figure. Maybe I can match it. I have, I don’t know, upwards of eight hundred dollars in my account back on Earth with your name on it.”
There was another clink as the tool was set down on the table.
“I mean, it doesn’t literally have your name on it, that would be weird,” said Cal. “Also, I’m pretty sure that scribbling the word ‘Vajazzle’ across a dollar bill is probably a federal crime of some kind, so there’s that, too.”
Vajazzle continued to ignore him. Her hand returned to the case.
“What have you done with the others?” Cal asked. “Are they alive?”
“For now,” said the assassin.
“Are they the right way up?”
Vajazzle said nothing.
“They are, aren’t they? They’re the right way up! Those lucky fonks.” He raised his voice. “Thanks a lot, guys! Way to show solidarity.”
“They can’t hear you,” said Vajazzle. She held up something that looked like a tiny pizza cutter. “No-one can hear you. No matter how loud you may scream.”
“Is that a challenge? Because I don’t know, I can scream pretty loud,” Cal boasted.
Vajazzle nodded. “We’ll find out,” she said. She set the slicing tool down on the table. “They provided me with these tools. I did not ask for them. I am not going to use them on you.”
Cal made a noise that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “You aren’t? Well, let me tell you, that’s quite a weight off my mind. I was starting to get worried there, watching you wave all that pointy stuff around.”
“I do not require tools,” the assassin continued, stepping around the table. Cal watched her feet as they brought her closer. When she stopped, her knees were level with Cal’s head. “I have my own methods for making you talk.”
“Talk? Listen, sweetheart, I will talk all day, no torture required. My mom used to say I could talk the hind legs off a donkey which, in retrospect, doesn’t really make any sense, but the point is--”
Something deep in Cal’s insides suddenly tightened, strangling the rest of his sentence before it could get out. Vajazzle twisted two fingers in the air, just a fraction, and pain erupted like fire behind Cal’s ribs.
“Feel that? That is your left lung under compression. Hurts, doesn’t it?” said Vajazzle. “And it will continue to hurt until you answer my questions.”
“You… h-haven’t… asked a-any,” Cal wheezed.
“No, but I will,” said the assassin. “Eventually.”
She knelt down and pushed back her hood, revealing her bald head and its wispy patches of gray. “I want you to know that I take no pleasure from this,” she said. The tip of her tongue flicked across her dry, chapped lips. She leaned in until Cal could feel the warmth of her breath on the side of his face. “Well,” she whispered. “Perhaps a little.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Cal’s scream did a few laps of the room, then faded away into a rasping, wheezing, not-quite-silence.
That had been a rough one. He wasn’t sure exactly where Vajazzle had targeted that time, but it was something just a little below the belly button that he suspected was probably quite important. It had writhed and twisted inside him, then stopped just in time to prevent him blacking out.
He was pretty sure he had blacked out once or twice already, but he hadn’t been taking notes. He thought he could remember brief moments without pain, although that could easily have been his mind playing tricks on him.
The rope creaked as he swung slightly from side to side. The plastic sheet that had been spread out on the floor beneath him was still spotlessly clean, and he almost felt disappointed that he had nothing to show for everything he
’d been put through.
Emphasis on ‘almost.’
“Question one,” said Vajazzle, tracing a withered finger downwards across his bare stomach and chest. “Where is the organism?”
The act of speaking proved both difficult and painful. His throat was fine – she hadn’t reached that part yet – but the effort of pushing air from his lungs made his already aching head ache more, and his whole chest constrict from the effort.
“His name,” Cal managed, “is Splurt. And I don’t know.”
Vajazzle grasped at the air. Cal tried to scream as his insides lit up in agony, but all that emerged was a burbling bubble of bloodied spit.
“P-please, I don’t know where he is,” Cal insisted. He convulsed and thrashed as Vajazzle brought her fingers together.
“Do you remember where you last saw it?”
Cal nodded. “Yes. Y-yes.”
“And where was it?” Vajazzle asked.
Cal gulped down a few desperate breaths and swallowed. Groaning with the effort, he nodded towards his left shoulder. “There.”
Vajazzle raised a second hand. Cal’s eyes widened in fright. “No, wait, no don’t, don’t, I didn’t mean it. He wasn’t there, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you!”
The assassin kept both hands raised, but held them steady. Cal let out a sob of relief, then nodded towards his right shoulder. “I think it was actually that side,” he managed, then he closed his eyes and gritted his teeth as his internal organs thrashed and twisted inside him.
* * *
Mech lay on the floor in his cell, the power-diverting dial on his chest turned all the way to ‘brainpower mode,’ making it impossible for him to move.
His eyes were open, staring blankly at the domed light in the center of the ceiling. There was a speaker system somewhere in the cell. He couldn’t move his head to see it, but he could calculate the exact location by plotting the path of the sound waves. He had chosen to focus on the waveform in an attempt to block out the actual sounds themselves. Unfortunately, it wasn’t working.
Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle Page 18
